A brief history of (mostly) wordless theatre

BY SARAH ROSE LEONARD

Geoff Sobelle’s HOME uses the body, rather than words, to tell stories. Nonverbal performance focuses our attention on how we behave physically, causing us to read emotions as much as narratives. It is said that 55 percent of our communication is from body language. Performers utilize this notion by using their physicality to shape characters and convey emotion. When we watch actions happen in real time, we are in sync with a performer’s presence. Did you know when an actor takes a big breath onstage the audience takes a breath too? Part of what makes physical theatre so immediate is that we subconsciously tune in to the actor, taking in their experience as our own. In stripping away language, HOME follows in the footsteps of a rich history of predominantly wordless performance traditions.

Perhaps the best-known nonverbal acting genre is mime. The genre shifted over time, and its lineage shows up in physically oriented theatre to this day. Early Greek and Roman mimes consisted of a farce—an improbable plot marked by broad humor—alongside song. They were textless, and chronicles of those performances show that the topics covered scenes from daily life punctuated by mythological drama. Mime was a staple of the annual hypersexual Floralia festival (which celebrated the goddess Flora), in which festivities began with naked mime actresses.

The first known mime to give words to his performance was the Roman knight Decimus Laberius (105–43 BCE). When Julius Caesar prompted him to accept a challenge by his rival, Publilius Syrus, to appear in one of his own mimes, he delivered a barbed prologue to Caesar himself: “None the first place for ever can retain/But, ever as the topmost round you gain/Painful your station there and swift your fall.” Ouch. Needless to say, Caesar judged in Syrus’ favor. Syrus, a former Syrian slave who rose through the ranks thanks to his talent, became Rome’s new leading mime under Caesar’s watch. His maxims held through to our modern lexicon, including gems like “to do two things at once is to do neither” and “a rolling stone gathers no moss.”

Forty years after Syrus’ day, in the first century BCE, mime and pantomime reigned as the most popular forms of entertainment in Greece and Rome. Pantomime most closely resembles what we think of as mime today. It consisted of a solo dance with music and a chorus, using masks to tell mythological stories through gestures. Surviving texts from the era reveal that the typical mime plot centered mostly on adultery. Actors took this all the way, having real sex on stage. Yes, you read that right: in Roman times, mimes had sex on stage in front of hundreds of audience members. One emperor, in fact, ordered only realistic violence and sex onstage. Obeying his command, mimes incorporated real killings into performance as well. Performers were sometimes killed by bears, and real-life convicted criminals were put to death on stage. As Christianity gained influence, so did opposition to mimes and such entertainments. Mimes retaliated by mocking Christian sacraments, such as baptism, on stage. When Christianity eventually became the official religion of the country, politics played a major role in the downfall of Roman theatre.

Roman forms of mime eventually evolved into what became commedia dell’arte, a Renaissance art form born in northern Italy in the 15th century. Commedia revolved around stock characters and scenes taken from traditional mime. While commedia did employ improvised dialogue—riffing on a known plot, usually involving, once again, adultery—actors’ body language made the form unique. Actors wore masks (in direct lineage from Roman pantomime) to show us which stock character they played. Because masks hid most of their faces, actors relied on exaggerated gesture to convey emotion. Commedia used nonverbal storytelling in its most heightened moments: physical comedy, music, acrobatics, and fighting generated laughter and awe for the audience who gathered in the streets to watch troupes of actors.

Buster Keaton

Photo by wikipedia.com

These outlandish physical grabs for an audience’s attention trickled into mass entertainment. Vaudeville, developed in France in the 1700s, quickly became the most popular form of entertainment when it made the jump to America. Vaudeville comprised a night of various acts: music, dance, trained animals, ventriloquists, magicians, acrobats, jugglers, puppets, and countless more entertainments packed an evening’s bill. American vaudeville itself developed from the spectacle-based forms of minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, burlesque, and concert saloons. Actors like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin got their start in vaudeville, then transitioned into silent comedies, becoming masters of slapstick during the height of the silent film era (1900–1920s). They mastered the “prat fall:” getting soaked with water, slipping on a banana peel, getting a pie thrown in one’s face. We still see these types of gags reliably earning laughs today.

As Chaplin entered his later years as a film actor, across the pond the French performer Marcel Marceau was beginning his career as one of the world’s most celebrated silent mimes. Marceau shifted the definition of mime, calling it “the art of expressing feelings by attitudes and not a means of expressing words through gestures.” Rather than using the body to provide jokes or express a story, Marceau’s work dwelled in the inner life. Marceau became world famous, traveling the globe with his act and winning awards wherever he placed his feet. He even befriended Michael Jackson, who cited Marceau’s movements as inspiration for his dance moves. When you visualize a mime, you probably think of Marceau playing Bip the Clown in a striped pullover and white face paint with black eyebrows. Just as the “Little Tramp” became Chaplin’s alter ego, Bip became Marceau’s.

Marcel Marceau

Photo by wikipedia.com

HOME creator Geoff Sobelle trained under another French influencer of physical performance: actor and teacher Jacques Lecoq. Lecoq, who established his own school in 1956, became one of the most influential theatre practitioners in the world. He blended elements of mime, commedia dell’arte, clown, and athletic training to create his own brand of highly physical acting training. Lecoq argued that all creative expression requires an available body, so movement became paramount in his classes. Mask work—a tradition of nonverbal performance from the heyday of Roman pantomime—is a foundation of Lecoq training, and remains his most widely exported methodology. An actor places a neutral mask on their face, which suddenly exposes their body. The actor’s fellow students notice physical posture, personal tics and gestures, gait, and breath. Striving to achieve a neutral base upon which to place a character, the actor is first aware of their own presence in their body. This presence breeds availability; by being hyper-aware of their body language an actor is able to spontaneously react to their scene partner or given circumstances, creating a liveness that draws an audience’s attention. Without this radical presence, an actor can become like anyone else on the street.

When you watch the actors in HOME, notice how their very presence communicates story and emotion. The focus they place on physical embodiment reorients our attention to our own corporal sensibilities. Theatre stripped of language asks us to use our intuition, rather than our logical brains, to feel out a story rather than comprehend one. Perhaps that is what makes wordless performance so timeless and accessible. Today, there is a renaissance of physically based theatre: from the hit Sleep No More, a site-specific dance riff on Macbeth in an abandoned hotel in Manhattan, to a nonverbal theatre festival in Croatia, new audiences are flocking to the form. Minimally verbal theatre is especially popular in the genre of theatre for young audiences, and in a growing movement of sensory-based theatre for individuals with cognitive differences. HOME—like mime, commedia, silent film, and contemporary physical theatre—appeals to a wide audience because it is so rooted in something everyone shares: these bizarre, communicative, beautiful bodies.